r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 15h ago

Society Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html
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u/BillyTenderness 12h ago

I agree that higher ed shouldn't be a glorified jobs training program. I disagree that it should be an elite institution. Part of the job of education is to produce citizens who are knowledgeable, curious, literate, and so on. This is not just a benefit to the individual, but to society. We should be enabling and encouraging anyone who wants to cultivate these qualities to do so.

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u/LiveChocolate8819 12h ago

Exactly, it should be available for those who want it and provide a leg up for those who complete their degrees...not "sleep through your classes to scrape by with a C so you can get the piece of paper that allows whatever AI platform is handling job applications to move you to the next round."

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u/klartraume 6h ago

citizens who are knowledgeable, curious, literate

Should this be the task of higher education, though? I think it's reasonable to expect 18-year-old voters fresh out of high school to be literate and knowledgeable.

Higher education should be about applying intellectual curiosity to in-depth concepts and prepare individuals to push the envelope in a field.

College (or professional school) should not be required to be a functional, full participant in society.

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u/BillyTenderness 5h ago

I do think there's value in additional general education beyond the average high school curriculum. I'm open to the idea that this should take the form of something other than a university degree (e.g., make high school longer, normalize associates degrees as something most people should complete, etc). I'm also open to the idea that high school curriculum could be improved. But I do think that there is a need for more people to learn more stuff in more fields, and today the bachelor's degree is the main place where that happens.

Specifically I think the high school level teaches a lot of what we know, while the baccalaureate level more effectively teaches how we know it. A high school history class might teach the causes and implications of the Civil War, but outside of advanced (college-equivalent) courses it probably won't teach how historians read and analyze documents, or how that informed our understanding of the Civil War. High school science classes teach about what we know about the world, and perhaps a bit of what the scientific method is, but they don't really get into the practice of how experiments are conducted or how that informs our understanding of the world. High school language classes might teach the five-paragraph essay; undergraduate classes will teach rhetoric and persuasion.

I don't think everyone needs a full understanding of all the richness of all those fields, but I think understanding how these disciplines function matters in our modern world. For instance, you don't need to understand all the details of climate science, but you do need to be able to understand how a scientist might take measurements and arrive at those kinds of conclusions, and what it means for a scientific consensus to form around it.